Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [21]
Increasing individual productivity and satisfaction using whatever method works more than adhering to a specific system;
Quality of life more than quantity of achievement;
Small, quick decision making that works toward current goals more than detailed, long-term planning;
Simplicity more than complexity; and
Responding to change more than following a script.
How to do agile self development sprints
A sprint is a not-too-big chunk of time during which you’ll focus on a limited list of priorities. In practice, a series of sprints allow you to correct and adjust as you learn from each one.
You can approach a sprint with these simple steps:
1. What is your big, exciting vision? What is it that you want to create, do, or be? Agile self development will help you get there, although the “there” may change along the way.
2. What are all the ways you could start? This is your chance to brainstorm and pour out all of the possibilities. (3x5 cards come in handy here, although making a list on paper is fine. If you're around other folks, this is a great time to ask for suggestions.)
3. Which of these possibilities will yield immediate results, is do-able now, and uses your current skills, abilities, and willpower? Whatever you choose will be what you're going to work on for the first sprint. You also need to choose a sprint length (a week, two weeks, or a month are common durations).
4. What can you measure to know if you’re making progress (that is, your velocity)? Examples would be whether you actually did something, how many minutes you did it for each day, how you felt at the end of the day, how many people you talked to about something, or how many hours you slept. Find something meaningful to measure, and then make an estimate of how you think things will go. Measurement leads to mindfulness.
5. Now, start the sprint! Go! Have fun with the experiment and keep that “quality of life” part in mind.
One useful technique with which to experiment is the daily standup. In agile software development this is a very quick meeting—so short that you don’t even need to sit down—where everyone on a team checks in with each other. The daily standup is an opportunity to ask the questions, "What did I do yesterday? What will I do today? Am I blocked?” This can happen with supportive buddies or through a brief time spent writing. The latter can combine well with the “daily pages” concept frequently mentioned in books on becoming a writer (and is thus an example of grabbing from anywhere tools and patterns that work for you and blending them into your own useful combination).
6. At the end of the sprint, conduct a retrospective. You can have it by yourself, write about it online or in a journal, or invite a buddy to talk about how things went. Buddies are always nice and they provide perspective, which is why some people love working in pairs. During your retrospective, ask:
How did it go?
How accurate was my estimate?
What did I learn about the world and myself?
What was the Awesome (the thing that went unexpectedly well)?
What was the Mystery (the thing I can't yet explain)?
What will I change for the next sprint? (This could be a small adjustment or huge pivot to a new idea.)
A sprint example
The goal of doing sprints is to update continually the experiment to move you closer to your vision, which could change over time, and to learn in the process. We’ll look at this idea further in Part IV, “December Discardia: Core Principle #3 – Perpetual Upgrade.” One of the best things about an agile approach is that it produces both early tangible results and learning.
Here's an example: Imagine someone whose vision is of a light-filled, uncluttered, top-floor apartment instead of her current dark and dreary basement. She knows she doesn't currently have the savings to move, so how can she use agile self development to make progress toward that goal over the next month?
She gets out a blank piece of paper and brainstorms many ways—practical and silly—to get her closer to her dream. Then she circles the